Dear Editor,
I know we are in the silly season but even so I must say I found The Soap Box featured in the Mayo Advertiser on June 29 particularly offensive. Once again the Save our Small Schools (SOSS ) campaign regurgitates its tired, unimaginative rhetoric. Yet again we have more of the ‘circling the wagons’ mentality, more about fighting off change and pleas to leave everything as it is.
Your contributor made reference to how ‘Irish culture’ has endured in rural Ireland historically. This is partly true but far too often what endured were the worst aspects of our cultural heritage: widespread superstition, a hopeless deference to authority and an acquiescing in a culture of abuse, whether perpetrated by priests, teachers, parents or neighbours. The idea that all any generation needs to do is transmit culture and identity from one generation to the next as if they were static, predefined things is not only erroneous but dangerous. An unquestioning approach to culture, traditions and identities ensures the survival of dysfunction and abuse. Culture and identity are living things that evolve and grow through the dynamic dialogue that each generation has with them.
Yes, as schoolgoing children our parents and grandparents ‘laughed and played and grew up with their friends and neighbours, forming bonds of friendship to cement communities and last lifetimes..’ This was true but the shameful realities of the past cannot be glossed over, the savage indiscriminate beatings administered in schools to children, the bullying, the brutalising of ‘slow learners’, the according of privileges to particular families and cliques, the culture of fear, fear of the teacher, fear of the church. The past was far from perfect, the idea that it was is a lie, a refusal to accept reality.
Your contributor mentions ‘little Johnnie standing on the side of the road ….. waiting for the bus to carry him to the next school’ outside his village. Yes, he might be unhappy waiting for the bus but he might be happy that there are far more opportunities in the next school – maybe they have an all-weather pitch there, swimming as part of the school curriculum, have gym days. Maybe Johnnie is broadening his horizons finding out that life can be good beyond the narrow confines of his own ‘community’ that he can have friends beyond his extended family, relations and neighbours.
Far from his ‘sense of place being destroyed by the anonymity of a relatively alien community’ as your contributor would have it, little Johnnie is meeting people with new ideas. He sees that people from his neighbouring village don’t have two heads and hairy palms. Maybe there are black children in his new school, he understands their skin colour is different but they laugh, cry and get angry just like he does. Little Johnnie learns to understand what freedom is, that it’s about not being afraid of new things, that life is not about replicating what his parents did but that life is an adventure, about having courage regardless of what it costs and that Dr Seuss gave the best advice: ‘Be who you are and say what you mean because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.’ Perhaps little Johnnie will grow up a more courageous outward looking individual who has little truck with mapmakers’ lines, pecking orders and kowtowing to toxic local orthodoxies. Johnnie will discover he has something to offer, that his authentic contribution will be to stand out and not become a live exhibit in a theme park dedicated to an imagined perfect past.
Rural Ireland is and can be a dynamic, outward looking place, a place that celebrates the best of the past in its annual heritage day but also holds a future day where people gather to imagine and debate the future. Change doesn’t mean death – merely a new way of being. A new vision for rural Ireland will involve us opening up our areas to the possibilities of new dialogues with people from neighbouring villages and from the towns and cities. Our cities are over-crowded but we’ve got space in rural areas and many unoccupied houses. A resettlement programme could mean more children for our rural schools. Surprisingly the SOSS campaign hasn’t made this argument. I wonder why! But then we must remember this campaign was always about preserving the status quo, nothing more. What an utter waste of time and energy!
Yours etc,
Tomás Lally,
Gallagh,
Partry.
